Barcamp Leeds
November 20, 2007
Last Saturday I took a wander down to the inaugural Barcamp Leeds event. After driving round in a circle for what seemed like an eternity, I finally found somewhere to park and made my entrance.
Things were already underway when I arrived, 4 separate sessions were being held and although I missed the start of them, I had a quick look at all 4. My fear with events like this was that the speakers would use the platform for nothing more than a glorified sales pitch. There was little evidence of this if truth be told and i sat in on a talk about some new mapping technology which looked very interesting indeed.
When the first round of sessions had finished, I managed to hook up with a couple of my friends, who happened to be hosting an SEO clinic later on in the day. Bizarre really, considering that after meeting at the recent(ish) Leeds Geek Up event, you would have sworn that they were mortal enemies!
Anyway, Dom & Mark I’m told did a fantastic job at helping some of the event participants evolve their SEO project plans. I couldn’t hang around all day so missed the clinic, and the Nintendo Gameathon, and the after event party (grrrr!)
I did manage to drop in on a session with Mark regarding Drupal. We have both been experimenting with various frame working and CMS platforms and are yet to find one that meets the needs of the designer, as opposed to the programmer.
After struggling to hear the Thai host (lovely guy, awful grasp of English pronunciation) do his best to extol the virtues of Drupal, I left the session no further forward. This is not a slight on the host who was a great chap but come on! We were trying to get our heads around some technical information and I’m afraid I just couldn’t understand what was being said.
It was agreed though that Drupal seems to be aimed more at developers, it has a steep learning curve and isn’t really designer friendly. Light CMS seems to be the only option for the time being although I’m just not a fan of the pricing model.
Back to Barcamp; Mark won himself an iPod Nano the lucky so and so! After ringing him on the evening to find out how the clinic went and being berated for leaving early, it was decided that Barcamp Leeds was a resounding success.
That has to be good for
Roll on Barcamp 2008 - I may even stay for longer than 2 hours 
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what?… no link? wheres the love?
lol rel nofollow lol